Your life is Just a Computer Program

It’s been bandied around quite a bit and even respectable scientists are jumping on the bandwagon. After all, mathematics is the only tool they can use to come up with some of the more advanced theories about matter and the universe, and computers are the matter of mathematics.

And for the first time ever a computer derived equation regarding the deepest theory of sub-atomic physics has been deemed enough to prove the theory – no scientific evidence is required (or can be found yet). So the simulation theory (google it) suggests we might just be a program running in a computer somewhere. Could that be possible? Well, look at the Shrek movies for example, if you look beyond the actual story and look at what is happening on the screen it’s easy to become entranced with the world in which Shrek lives. Okay, it looks painted, not completely natural, and that;s the way it would have been done in Disney’s day, a huge team of artists would paint every single frame of the movie – 26 for each second or something like that, thousands and thousands of human, hand drawn, pictures, shown in progression to make a two hour film.. The artists had to decide how things interacted with each other – how a leaf might fall in the wind, how a shadow should cast across a rock and they had to do it each time it happened, using just their knowledge and memory. Absolutely incredible! A real feat of human endevour, just like building a great wall or pyramid.

Shrek is different however. The animators create him digitally in a computer, then assign him attributes like mass, strength, colour, texture etc. And they do that just once.

Then they put him in a world equally digitally derived, with digital attributes like gravity, friction, density, weather etc. And create objects and buildings and other characters and plants, giving each it’s own basic set of properties – and again they only have to do that once. They can duplicate one bird a thousand times to create a flock at the press of a button. They then position the characters and props – set their paths and the computer works out all the rest – how they bounce off each other, how the digital moon lights the digital scene and clouds, how the digital water run’s down the stream. All of it, a whole digital world, mostly working automatically with a little help and prodding form the animators – or maybe, if you are Shrek, from the gods.

If you are Shrek, and you live in that world with everything else, and if you realize it, then it’s as real as this one to you, and you may even ponder who the animator is – who drew you. So yes, maybe you’re life is a computer program.